Video games on a physical disc are so yesterday!

Tired of video games laying all over your family room? Loose discs, empty cases, games for systems long since dead… you know the drill.  Well, starting in August, Microsoft is going to offering you a whole new way to buy games for your Xbox 360.

Xbox 360 games on demand will be available through the marketplace in your system dashboard.  To start off there will be 30 games, but additional titles will be added each week with their prices being comparable to what you would pay in a retail store for them.  There is no word yet if brand new titles will be released this way, but for now it appears it will be older games.

This is quite exciting, but will offer up two potential problems as we see it: not all Xbox systems came with a hard drive, and you could lose all of your data.

The hard drive issue is solved easily, but not cheaply.  You’re also taking about downloading quite large files, so you could eat through your hard drive space in no time flat.  Somehow we don’t see people buying multiple hard drives and swapping them out like in the old days of memory cards.

The second major problem is the potential loss of data.  Say your hard drive gets corrupted somehow… bye-bye games.

There is definitely something to be said for the approaching death of media in physical formats, but we certainly aren’t up to mass adoption yet with some major headaches/hurdles left in our way.  (We’re not even touching on length of time to download full games here)  Even with these problems, this is an exciting time for video games, and it only looks to get even more so.

Here is a video demo of how the system will work.